- Università: Bocconi
- Docenti:
Fabrizio Zerbini
- Studenti:
Andrea Dell’Arte, Veronika Gerasyuk, Aaditya Khurana, Hafsa Nagawa, Francesca Roggero Fossati, Nicolas G. Pereyra Rantes
Nowadays, people conduct frenetic lives. Life has resumed its pre-Covid rhythms: employees have returned to their offices, students can now go to their classes in person, and people are going back to doing the activities that they have stopped doing for so long during the pandemic. People have little time to spare.
For this reason, we came up with a concept that allows consumers to save time. Our innovative idea will completely revolutionize the way consumers do their grocery shopping. The supermarket will be called Kronos, to emphasize the concept of time. In fact, "chronos" in Greek refers to quantitative time that can be measured with the clock. We want consumers to know that Kronos supermarket values their time. Specifically, we want to open our first supermarket in City Life, the neighborhood in the heart of Milan where many offices from major corporations are located, thus where there are many workers who have little time available to do their groceries. By targeting milanese workers, we want to offer high quality products at medium to high prices.
Our aim is to help consumers find their way around the supermarket and enable them to do their groceries in a short time by helping them locate every item that they intend to buy. We want to help consumers who have a busy lifestyle to shop for everything they need, sparing the time of walking throughout the entire supermarket. By means of a survey we conducted, we found a strong desire from most respondents to be able to quickly locate the products they need thus reducing the time they have to spend in the supermarket.
We want to achieve this by leveraging today's technology in the physical retail world.
Specifically, this will be achieved through our supermarket app. This app allows the consumers to select what they need to buy by having them choose from all the products available in the supermarket. They can then create their personal shopping list in the app. The app will be especially helpful to all those who do not speak Italian, since it will show translations for the products and their ingredients in several languages. Milan is an international city where almost 20% of the inhabitants are foreigners, therefore we believe that this feature will make the grocery experience much easier and faster for those who do not speak the language. Furthermore, we believe this will increase sales, as foreigners will feel more confident about the products they are buying, and will help Kronos gain reliability among the international part of the population.
The real revolutionary feature of the app is that once in the supermarket, customers will be able to select the option to view the shortest route based on the shopping list. In this way, they will know exactly how to find their way around the supermarket, thus avoiding wasting time. Considering some consumers might be reluctant to download the app, we decided to tackle this risk by offering a web version of the app as well as placing screens on the shopping carts to enable everyone to exploit this unique feature. Nevertheless, in the long term we want consumers to download the app, therefore we will offer special promotions and offers to those who adopt it.
The app will also allow consumers to visualize whether products in their shopping list are about to go out of stock, thus recommending alternative options with similar nutritional values. In addition, the app will also recommend products that pair nicely with those already inside the shopping list. The interior design of the store will be wooden to emphasize the fact that it sells organic and healthy products, and will convey a more luxurious and appealing environment to the intended target. In the store there will also be a cutting station to serve fresh vegetables and meats and a wine room to elevate the quality of our service. An additional feature of the app will allow customers to reserve the products from the vegetable cutting station. It will help our customers save time at home during the cooking process, thus enhancing the post-purchase experience.
Considering that at peak hours there might be a lot of people asking for this service, it will be possible to pre-order the freshly cut vegetables and collect them in-store at a specific time. We believe all these features will make the customer experience easier compared to any other supermarket, thus this will increase our sales.
We are aware that for the execution to be flawless and for there to be real value added in our proposition, a condition must be taken into account. In fact, all products must always be shelved correctly and management must be highly organized. Therefore, most of our staff will be employed exclusively to make sure that the placement of products is always accurate in order to streamline the grocery shopping experience. Furthermore, the staff will receive training so that they can support customers in case the app freezes and they can’t visualize the route anymore.
